Steam News has details on a new patch for RAGE that's now automatically available to update id Software's first -person shooter. The lengthy patch notes go into extreme detail on what the patch does, as it offers access to many graphics settings not present in the release version of the game. Here's the into which explains this:

RAGE defaults to lower video settings to allow the game to work on a wide variety of hardware and software configurations. Unfortunately, it is not possible to anticipate all possible graphics driver issues in combination with unique end user hardware and software configurations. For this reason RAGE does not automatically increase video/graphics settings as this could result in negative side effects on specific hardware and software configurations. The original release of RAGE does not expose many video/graphics options for people to tweak because some of these settings, although desirable from a quality perspective, simply will not work on specific configurations either due to hardware limitations and/or driver bugs. Due to popular demand for more video and graphics options, this patch updates the video settings menu and exposes several quality and performance settings. However, not everyone may be able to increase the settings due to hardware limitations and/or driver bugs.

Creston wrote on Oct 10, 2011, 12:29:I THINK the reason they disabled the tweaks is because they didn't know what all people had been tinkering with, and thus couldn't guarantee that the patch wouldn't behave weirdly with one of those settings enabled.

Disabling all the tweaks to make sure the patch is sound, and then re-enabling them again after the next patch makes quite a bit of sense.

True.

Shoveling this aside for a second, has anyone else noticed the volumetric lighting effects, and how the atmospheric affect actually multiply and dither onto the characters properly (i.e. the multiplication of the effect is directly related to distance, as opposed to a carte blanche fixed multiplier)? That's pretty badass. Added with AI/AF I can almost see someone making a game where smoke and light can actually be used effectively in a DM setting in a realistic way, rather than the cartoon-ish way we are seeing it now (COD, BF3). This effect was particularly noticeable in the mutant clean-up mission in the second wasteland hub. I was actually losing sight of things in the fog (and glare IN the fog) in a realistic way (visually). This is one of the first advances I've seen in a long while that made me sit back and say, "Damn. That's pretty cool."